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I don't believe all audiophiles are music lovers. I don't think all people who have sound systems are music lovers. I think they want to fill the house with something just like they fill all the space in their closets. I especially don't think that people with home theaters are necessarily music lovers. I would go even further and suggest that people who listen to a limited number of performers and recordings from a specific period of the life, and do that for the rest of their life, are not much music lovers. Some of this greed and drive for better and best equipment, I think, is culturally determined predominantly male behavior associated with male focus on performance. I can imagine a female who likes music and who wants a decent music player, but I have a hard time imagining many women getting into 'audiophile' equipment, and especially expensive and showy equipment. I suspect most women are perplexed by audiophiles. I have said this before, I have never seen a woman at a meeting of the Minnesota Audio Society....well maybe one woman once. Sound perception itself can be fascinating, interesting, meaningful in itself regardless of whether it is music. It would be swell to have machines that made orchestral complexes of odors. Are people who buy 'sports cars' that cost greater than $100,000 driving and sports car enthusiasts?
I know that is meant as insight, but for me it has the whiff of audiophile virtue signalling. It's a common theme among audiophiles to use the criticism "you are only in to the gear...I'm in to the MUSIC!" (Note how regularly this "they don't really care about The Music!" critique is launched at ASR. It's seen as the ultimate taboo and insult. The virtuous audiophile is all about the music!)
Personally, having known and met now countless audiophiles over many decades, I've never met the mythical audiophile who doesn't really love music.
And I don't care to try to tell anyone else they "don't love music" (unless they tell me they don't).
(Now...if you find someone with only Kenny G albums...then you have a case )
That's precisely why find "audiophilia" packed with connotations I despise. Is Venom's Black Metal a good source? To most audiophiles, no. But that is absolutely irrelevant for the fidelity of it's reproduction.
But...if you are not seeking Good Quality Sound.....what is the relevancy of your "high fidelity reproduction"? Are you only performing a science experiment, in which the pleasingness of the sound is irrelevant? Aside from being rather unusual, that would conform to the stereotype of ASR's most ardent critics.
It does not have to sound good to you, it has to sound true to the source.
I think you are misjudging the situation. "High Fidelity" and "Sound Quality" are separable. Everyone knows this. That is why we can talk about "poor quality source material." It's why if you had a High Fidelity stereo system, and you played the original recording of Steely Dan's Goucho back to back with a version of the recording that had been EQ'd to sound horribly thin and also had distortion added, making it sound like a bad old flip-phone recording...everyone would be able to rate the latter as "bad" or "worse" sound quality than the original. Despite that you are playing each back with Perfect Fidelity!
You really do care about sound quality as the underlying goal. Insofar as you seek higher quality equipment, which to you will be accurate equipment, yes you accept that some recordings will be revealed as poor sound quality...but the promise of better equipment is Better Sound Quality for many recordings. Otherwise...you wouldn't really care. (Or otherwise you are doing science experiments, rather than music appreciation - which is fine of course if that's what you are seeking. But I suggest it would be unlikely/unusual). And, again, since "Sound Quality" and "High Fidelity" are not one and the same, you can't conflate them, and should realize which is your actual goal
This has all been solved by the various Harman curves, I thought?
Yes! In one sense that is just what the Harman (and other research) sought to do: determine what most people think of as "good" sound quality.
Though ultimately it's best understood regarding the "sound quality" of speakers, not "sound quality" in general. Because otherwise there is a conundrum involved. To even perform the tests they had to already have some criteria of "Good Sound Quality" for selecting the recordings used in the tests!
In other words, they weren't going to use "Poor Recordings" through the speakers to establish what people thought was the highest sound quality.
They wouldn't have selected some scratchy, tinny old recording someone made on an old mono snuck-in-to-the-grateful-dead-concert tape deck.
That's why they used tracks like Tracy Chapman's Fast Car (IIRC) among others - tracks known for "High Sound Quality." So, strictly speaking in regard to the Harman tests, you have the chicken/egg problem there in regards to any grand conclusion about Sound Quality.
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